At the end of the work day my husband will often pick me up to carpool home.  Often, I’m not ready to leave just yet; sometimes having to finish sending one last email, or in this case – working on the floor during the last week of Titanic.  He usually sits patiently in his truck listening to music or tidying up his paperwork.  That is, unless he knows we’re up to something big.

As I came off the floor finishing my shift; I took a look around the parking lot and noticed he wasn’t in his truck.  And so, I continued around the parking lot to our loading dock where I suspected Alex and Dana were up to something.  And something big  – Alex is testing some demonstration experiences, and today it was about exploding hydrogen balloons.  With rocket ignition.

Of course my husband is right in the middle of the action, helping to figure out the technique of ignition.  I asked how it was going, he replied, “I am SCHOOLING these two in science!”.  And under my breath, I murmured, “Well, they’re doing their job”.

Alex and Dana are not inept when it comes to science, nor were they playing dumb for my husband’s sake.  They were just doing their job well:  facilitating an experience.  Facilitating it so that my husband felt like he had viable answers, he had the opportunity to experiment and try his ideas, and all the while they were keeping the environment safe for him to test out these ideas.

Even though science demonstrations typically have a staff member displaying all the cool and dangerous tricks on stage; I have a feeling you’ll be amazed at what Alex is thinking up.  A demonstration where every bang, boom and whiz is performed by *gasp* a visitor in the audience.  Where visitors who wants to participate will have a chance to freely explore and test out their own experiments on stage.  I like to imagine the visitor who leaves the Presentation Theatre saying, “I’ve never got to do that before in my life!”.  Alex, don’t take it personally when someone proclaims they ‘were schooling you’ on the job.  It’s just a sign you’re doing a great job.

-stacey.

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I love board games. I especially love collaborative board games because I like working on a team and I hate competition (I blame my twin brothers for this).

My favorite board game is called Pandemic. Maybe you’ve played it.  If you haven’t, imagine that you and your friends work for the Center for Disease Control and you have to work together to stop four diseases from spreading around the world. You have to coordinate how you will share research to find cures, while also traveling around the world to contain outbreaks. Each of you has a role that gives you special skills, so it matters who does what, and when, and where.

Every time I play Pandemic I am struck by how perfectly balanced it is. How the players’ actions balance the rapid spread of disease. How the difficulty of traveling around the board balances with the skills each player gets to use depending on the role they are playing. How even in the expansion pack, where you get to make your own roles and action cards, it’s still really hard to unbalance the game. The thing I really respect about Pandemic is how difficult it is and how satisfying it is to do something really difficult (and stressful) with your pals.

Anyway, I think Pandemic is a masterpiece in game design and I’ve often wondered how Matt Leacock, the creator of Pandemic became such a genius. Well, now I know. He pilot tested it, of course.

Here’s an interview with Matt Leacock from a dude’s blog (www.mediajunkie.com)

How long did it take to design the game?

I started working on Pandemic in January of 2004 and signed off on the final rules in October 2007. I put together a quick-and-dirty paper prototype in about 30 minutes with a couple of sharpies, a standard deck of cards, some wooden cubes, and a few pawns. Unlike many games I’ve worked on, Pandemic showed promise right from the start – I could feel tension in it right away.

What was the process like?

[...] The process I used relied on many iterations. In each trial, I’d jot down a rule set and either try it out myself or present it to a group of playtesters. After playing a game, I’d keep rules that helped make the game more engaging and do what I could to remove any rules that sounded interesting—at the time—but didn’t match up to the core objectives. I also sat out a lot of games and closely observed players to note what behaviors they exhibited during each game. Where did they get confused? Ask questions? Check the rules? I did my best to file off all the sharp, confusing edges by redesigning the game to fit players’ mental models wherever I could.

The two biggest hurdles are finding a novel mechanism that is fun and fine tuning the design for balance and learn-ability. For this game, the mechanism came right away and the bulk of the work was tuning. … I still haven’t found a process for repeatedly discovering fun and novel games, however. I suspect it has a lot to do with loads of fearless experimentation.

As much as I‘m stoked to find out that one of my game design heroes pilot tests his games exactly how we pilot exhibits (except the part about having 3 years to test), what I really can’t get over is when he says, “Pandemic showed promise right from the start – I could feel tension in it right away.”

Stacey and I were trying to articulate this earlier today. We were talking about how to tell if people are engaged with a pilot. That sometimes they’re engaged when they look like they’re having fun, but there’s another kind of engagement that looks totally different. There’s this more elusive kind of engagement that is really easy to over look, describing that kind of engagement as “tension” captures it perfectly.

-dana!

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I had been thinking about using found materials to insulate yourself for a long time. I’m not sure where the idea came from—maybe the unconventional insulators folks use when making Art Shanties (imagine an ice fishing hut covered in a layer of stuffed animals).

This time last year late one afternoon there was a snowstorm. After an exhausting week full of interviewing designers we armed ourselves for an adventure outside. I dressed in some disposable painters coveralls and fishing waders, Kris nabbed some coveralls and a reflective vest and Joleen (a former Exhibit Developer) had us wrap her in cling wrap. We put on goggles and giant sunglasses, grabbed cafeteria trays (we used to have more cafeteria trays than you can imagine) and went sledding. It was super fun, but we all got super cold. We came back inside after a few runs down the hill in the Amazement Park and made improvements to our outfits. Eugene finished whatever he was working on and joined in (with plastic wrap pants) and Katherine wore a giant vinyl caftan that doubled as a sled.

volunteers insulate themselves

A few days later we tested the exhibit with visitors. A high school girls’ basketball team from Lethbridge were the first to play with it. They giggled a lot and wrapped each other in newspaper and plastic wrap. Then they went outside and ran around like crazy in the snow to test their outfits. Over the course of the weekend a few visitors tried this exhibit, but most shied away. A couple of adult visitors walked by and said, “Well, we don’t want to do that but kids would like it.” (By the way, that is my least favorite comment people make when we’re testing exhibits–it is both condescending to kids and the activity.) I tried a few different iterations, but Insulate Yourself didn’t make the cut as a stand-alone exhibit. We’ll try it as a program—for people who share the value that looking ridiculous = coolness it’s great, and a Discovery Leader could spot those groups when they’re around.

-dana

Here’s a video of the NSC Exhibit Developers insulating themselves. Katherine gets credit for taking the photos, that’s why you won’t see her lovely vinyl poncho in any of the shots.

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Everything came from something else for this pilot. It’s a hybrid of two other things we’re interested in: logic circuits and player pianos. We came up with the idea of making a programmable player piano, because (we hope) it will be an intuitive way for people to play with circuits. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow if we were right.

Next, the parts. I salvaged a toddler’s electronic keyboard we already had. This keyboard is a trooper; we’ve used it in 2 pilots and as a sample project to teach soldering. A spinning drum was cannibalized from a seismograph Kris made a couple of months ago out of a coffee can and K’nex. The switches have been used countless times and the thumbtacks had been previously used as thumbtacks.

You can program a song by arranging thumbtacks around the drum. As the drum spins, the tacks bump against levers, making them close a circuit. The circuits trigger the guts of the keyboard to play tones. So if you put three thumbtacks in a row under one lever, spinning the drum will make it play the same note three times.

Thanks to Mark for helping clean up the electronics and making it look prettier.
Come to the Prototype Lab tomorrow afternoon (Friday 12-3pm) to play with our circuit pilots!

-dana!

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